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Thus why employees are more polite to a boss than one another. Furthermore, business ethic teaches the importance of developing and maintaining relationships with powerful or potentially powerful colleagues as a means to one's future success. An attitude summarized simply as networking. A practice guided by selfishness and executed with disregard to honesty. To collide with another socially means risk of loosing that person as a potential resource. For despite great ambition among participants, networking is a strategic game requiring more caution than risk. Artificial relationships formed not by 'kissing ass' so much as biting one's tongue.
All this aside, the true problem lies not solely with the creation of politeness but rather an absence of it, impoliteness. For just as good can not exist absent of evil, right absent of wrong, or literacy absent illiteracy, there exists a prejudice to define concepts not for what they are but what they are not. Practical null definitions. Not entirely a misleading practice on its own, for one can say night is the absence of day, and maintain no bias for either – but with the incorporation of stack style quantification, that is the association of value, words take on prejudice. A binary model is only useful when yes or no are meaningless, that is abstract representations in of themselves. Yet our social patterns are similar to circuit board architecture, where people interacting as ones and zeros produce inaccurate oversimplifications for how things are. Nazism as example: Aryans could not exist without contrasting Semites. If you are not with us, you are against us ideology. (In the case of the holocaust, German bystanders were either too oblivious or too polite to challenge the ridiculousness in control.) |
To bring children back into the discussion, one can better appreciate their blunt honesty through understanding the idea that they are only impolite in contrast to politeness. It is a simple matter of context. If everything is A, then B stands out drastically. Concretely, if everyone at church is silent in prayer aside from two teenagers gossiping in the back pew, there is a disrupting of homogeneity taking place. But only context can make talking an inappropriate or appropriate action; for if everyone in church were talking amongst themselves the teenagers would be of no concern. Without A there is no such thing as B. Children maintain environments void of context. No one is polite, therefore no one can be impolite.
Further concerning perspective and context, consider behaviors typical to the young. A crying baby. Is this situation universally annoying, or only to adults that value a privatization of sound waves? Similarly, the noisy kid on an airplane. Is he being inconsiderate of other people or are they being selfish by requesting a quiet environment? The daughter refusing to eat broccoli at dinner. Is she disobeying the wishes of mom, or is mother imposing an undesired substance upon her plate? A child that does not share his toys with other. Is he being selfish, or rightfully protective of private assets. Or even the young scholar that whines about homework. Is this an issue of under-motivation on the individuals part, or mass-compliance among the other students? And so on with how the honest behavior of children conflict with the conformity demanding environments of adults. |
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